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Saturday, June 14, 2014

THE CRISIS OF AUTHORITY IN THE MUSLIM WORLD

THE SHARIAH’S LOST SOUL

Maryam Sakeenah

‘Shariah’ (Islamic law) has become one of the most spine chilling,
sensational words in contemporary lexicon. In the United Kingdom with its
sizeable Muslim population, fear of the Shariah is palpable as we hear of
alarmist articles about ‘creeping shariah’ all over the UK, concern over the
proliferation of halal meat or veils. Often the fear is irrational, used by
xenophobes, racists and supremacists who resent multiculturalism and are uncomfortable
with diversity.

But it is not just the
Islamophobes and sensationalist media con artists who make the Shariah seem
grotesque and terrifying. The spurious ‘caliphate’ of sorts run by the ISIS in
Iraq and its bloodcurdling atrocities in the name of Shariah. Nigeria’s Boko
Haram has followed suit with its brutal misogynistic practices. Groups like
this which deface and defile the Shariah’s sanctity continue to proliferate all
over the crisis-ridden Muslim world.

And yet, crazy as this sounds, the demand for Shariah is not just
understandable and legitimate but also an aspiration shared by an overwhelming
majority of Muslims worldwide. The PEW Research Centre’s 2013 surveyfinds that most Muslims
are deeply committed to their faith and want its teachings to shape not only
their personal lives but also their societies and politics. Many express a
desire for shariah to be recognized as the official law of their country. Solid
majorities in most of the countries favour the establishment of shariah,
including 99% of Muslims in Afghanistan, 71% of Muslims in Nigeria, 72% in
Indonesia, 74% in Egypt, 84% in Pakistan and 89% in the Palestinian
territories.

To make sense of this, one needs to understand that
the Prophet (SAW) was a successful head of state and lawgiver, and that in
statehood did Islam find culmination as an established system and way of life.
The Islamic State flourished and ruled over continents for centuries. In fact,
for most of Islam’s history before the colonization of Muslim lands, Islamic
law was established as the law of the land. This has left an indelible impact
on Muslim collective imagination, imbuing it with nostalgia in the narrative of
a bygone glory.

The introduction of ‘Anglo Muhammadan Law’ in
British-ruled South Asia and the displacement of traditional Muslim fiqhi
madhabs (juristic schools) in favour of colonial legal systems in other parts
of the Muslim world has intensified this nostalgia. The decadence in post
colonial Muslim societies is seen now as the result of the absence of Shariah
law. Given the fact that many areas across the Muslim world writhe under
oppression, tyranny and the systematic suppression of religious aspirations by
corrupt secular regimes, this nostalgic longing has at times fuelled militancy
and violence by rebel groups. The demand for Shariah is used by these militant
and violent Islamist movements vying for political control and power. Secular
political ambitions are sanctified with the holy battlecry for the restoration
of Shariah law.

‘Whose Shariah?’, however, is a contentious, tricky
question we do not have many answers to- but it is the very heart of the matter.
The implications of this are seriously damaging to the wider interests of
Islam.

Invoking religion and using religious rhetoric
gives a religious colour to the violent, attention-seeking tactics used by
these groups. Hence Islam is perceived as either intrinsically violent or with
a dangerous potency to fuel religious violence. Simplified, reductionist
stereotypes of Islam and Muslims are strengthened. This makes harder the task
of peacemakers, healers and arbiters engaged in toning down the precarious
polarization between Islam and ‘the West.’

The media shows such violence and militancy as
essentially religious, not seeing it for its secular-materialist socio
political underpinnings or the raw drive for winning power to redress perceived
disempowerment by fringe groups.

Speaking of Boko Haram and ISIS, it has been
heartening to see Muslim opinion leaders and scholars speak out against their
methods, emphatically dissociating these from mainstream Islam. However, highly
needful as it was, what was found wanting was a more specific refutation of the
textual basis from where such actions of such groups seek justification.

In fact, there is a vital and basic understanding
almost missing from Muslim collective consciousness- that many minutiae of
Islamic law are rooted in cultural context. They were neither revealed laws nor
stipulated as universal, absolute unalterable laws by divine will. The Quran
and sunnah directly address and legislate for a few matters, and these texts
are but few compared to the entire volume of Islamic juristic literature which
was compiled and developed over the historical evolution of Islamic
civilization.

The fairly modest content of Islamic laws in the Quran
and sunnah means that for deriving the rest of the laws recourse has to be made
to jurisprudence through scholarly consensus over the ages. More importantly,
it means that such lawmaking has to be guided and inspired by the essence and
ethical guideline of the principles of the Quran and sunnah.

That egalitarianism, establishment of justice,
protection of rights and an interest in ending human misery to make possible higher
ethical and spiritual functions of human existence is a core objective of Islam
cannot be doubted. Islam had to deal with a society in which slavery- predating
Islam- was a basic social institution. Islam regulated it by law, defining
parameters and setting ethical guidelines. Wars involved sexual abuse
victimizing women of the enemy side. Here too Islam set down rights and
responsibilities to prevent such abuse. It is this humane dimension and ethical
orientation Islam gave which shines through and endures over these temporal pre
Islamic cultural traditions and practices. In this day and age when human
progress has achieved the legal abolition of slavery and its associated
practices, it is utterly ludicrous to invoke these ancient traditions as part
of Islam. The rights of people recognized and protected in this day and age are
sacred to Islam which teaches supremacy of law and human progress through
constant social reform. Violating these established principles on which a
silent global consensus exists, is sinful. It is important here to remind
ourselves of the fact that the Prophet (SAW) wistfully remembered the signing
of a pre Islamic document of rights (Half ul Fazul) and expressed his full
endorsement of it as a prophet of Islam.

The failure of contemporary Muslim jurisprudence has
been the inability to put the spirit at the core of the letter of the law and
to make Muslims understand that the law exists to protect the essential values;
that it is the protection of those values that are the heart of the matter,
while laws are often bound by culture and historicity. This explains the
unseeing literalism and fanaticism for restoring the letter of the Shariah in
corrupt and decadent Muslim societies and the preoccupation with juristic
nitpicking in the Muslim world.

It is the crisis of authority in the Muslim world due
to which random groups pining for the return of Muslim glory make bold claims
as to what constitutes Shariah law and give their own misconstrued versions
tracing them back to sacred texts or early Muslim culture. Those who got
together to condemn ISIS and Boko Haram’s actions as unIslamic must also with a single
voice present a blueprint of Islamic law that is relevant, practical and
applicable today, in tune with contemporary cultural and socio political
context. It is a long haul, but unless such a juristic magnum opus is initiated,
twisted, grotesque and soulless versions of ‘Shariah’ will keep haunting us
like a spectre. Authority as to who interprets religious law and how has to be
won back.

Abdal Hakim Murad
(Tim Winter) writes of the plight of the Nigerian schoolgirls:

“... the whole atrocity underscores the crisis of
leadership which is now a grave problem for global Islam. The Boko Haram
abductions have been condemned by all the traditional authorities: Nigeria’s
chief sultan, the grand muftis of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the leading Islamic
universities, the main Islamic bodies here in Britain. It’s been a moment of
unity. Unfortunately, we can’t pretend that it has helped. For the last decade
or so, across the Muslim world small but ferocious factions have defied the
traditional leaders and taken religion into their own hands. In every case the
result has been a disaster for communities and even whole countries. The use by
these factions of religious rhetoric to validate what is often a political or
economic grievance has left many religious leaders at a loss. In some cases the
imams have been assassinated for speaking out against the extremists; this has
happened in Nigeria, as elsewhere. So what should they do? The founder of Islam had no time for extreme
zealotry. ‘May the fanatics perish,’ he once commented. If he detected extreme
or hateful behaviour in anyone he would condemn it immediately. Present-day
leaders recall this, as they struggle to find ways of fighting terrorism.So this scandal cuts more deeply. How to restore
the authority of the mainline leadership, among embittered young men who trust
no-one? Spies and bullets will not, in the long term, defeat these aberrations:
the religious leadership must find some way of regaining its moral authority in
an age of rapid change and rampant injustice.”

If the ethical
spirit of Muslim law is not reinstated, if the textual bases for inhuman,
brutal and violent practices not refuted, routine condemnations from Islam’s
defenders will serve no more than as rhetorical generalisations.